The Hoarder

My eyes landed on a quote that said our lives boil down to what we choose to carry and what we choose to let go.

It was a timely message because I’ve realized my heart is a hoarder.

She’s a compulsive picker of rare, particular things, with a bad habit of forming sticky attachments - sometimes out of fear, sometimes admiration.

She loves to camouflage as the hearts she embraces; wear their clothes, slip on their shoes, and strut around in their affection as if they could be hers.

Just like I pick up gemstones and seashells on hikes and coastlines, I pick up people, their stories, our moments, all the feelings, and the “way things could have been.”

I pick them up then I store them beneath my bed of silver curls, along with all the things said, unsaid, and definitely thought but awkwardly avoided.

And my mind - that untrustworthy friend - she’s my clingy heart’s accomplice.

She tells me it’s all worth saving because then how else would I identify myself?

Well, I haven’t known how, and then my ears landed on an episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert Podcast,” where his guest was actor Jason Segel.

Segel said at around 33-years-old he needed to - for the first time - look at his life as a big blank canvas.

He said, “I had kinda stretched 24-year-old Jason as far as I could, and at 33 the rubber band kinda snapped.”

I related tremendously to that.

He said it was the same time period he stopped drinking, and I related more because of my current commitment to quit smoking.

“And, so, I had this blank canvas ahead of me,” he said, “where most things by which I defined my identity were suddenly gone… What do I do now? … It was a big, scary moment of ‘who am I without this stuff?”

I put my hands together, bowed, and thanked the universe for dropping language around a feeling I’d been struggling to pinpoint.

I thought, who would I be without any of the past that I've been carrying?

And then I thought, still me.

It led me to realize what my heart has to do: forgive.

My heart clings because she still hopes that what is past can change, and my mind lies and tells her that isn’t exactly what she’s doing.

Forgiveness is the only way I can make peace with the past in a forward motion.

And since I can only move forward, I do choose to forgive; to make space for new experiences and connections…

And start again with one big, blank, scary canvas.

Now I can see, the test of wisdom will be

what I choose to pick up in the first place.

britt sketch, 2016

advice seldom taken…